Businesses increasingly assume political roles, despite issues of legitimacy. The presented two case studies illustrate how businesses harness their political influence in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices through collaboration and dialog with stakeholders and civil society actors. These cases are set around issues arising in global supply chains in sourcing activities where the core problem is associated with businesses managing extended responsibilities under conflicting institutional conditions. The article seeks to provide empirical examples of Political CSR and illustrates the role of (...) deliberative democracy in contemporary business behavior. It adopts a Western business perspective, more specifically from an end-producer and retailer’s standpoint. Findings suggest that civil society is influential in driving these businesses to act responsibly. Joint collaboration is understood as key to strive toward holistic solutions. Political CSR theory remains an ideal, but offers fruitful grounds for speculating on what the political role of business is or could be and how this translates into pragmatic implications for businesses. (shrink)

The paper explores the ongoing debate between the narrow version of CSR proposed by Milton Friedman and the broader version of CSR, which includes additional ethical and/or philanthropic obligations. Implications are then discussed.

Since scholarly interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has primarily focused on the synergies between social and economic performance, our understanding of how (and the conditions under which) companies use CSR to produce policy outcomes that work against public welfare has remained comparatively underdeveloped. In particular, little is known about how corporate decision-makers privately reconcile the conflicts between public and private interests, even though this is likely to be relevant to understanding the limitations of CSR as a means of aligning (...) business activity with the broader public interest . This study addresses this issue using internal tobacco industry documents to explore British-American Tobacco’s (BAT) thinking on CSR and its effects on the company’s CSR Programme. The article presents a three-stage model of CSR development, based on Sykes and Matza’s theory of techniques of neutralization, which links together: how BAT managers made sense of the company’s declining political authority in the mid-1990s; how they subsequently justified the use of CSR as a tool of stakeholder management aimed at diffusing the political impact of public health advocates by breaking up political constituencies working towards evidence-based tobacco regulation; and how CSR works ideologically to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the relative merits of competing approaches to tobacco control. Our analysis has three implications for research and practice. First, it underlines the importance of approaching corporate managers’ public comments on CSR critically and situating them in their economic, political and historical contexts. Second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on the political aims and effects of CSR. Third, by showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR. (shrink)

Prior research suggests that ownership structure is associated to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developed countries. This article examines whether and how ownership structure affects CSR in emerging markets using Chinese firms' social responsibility ranking. Our empirical evidences show that for non-state-owned firms, corporate ownership dispersion is positively associated to CSR. However, for state-owned firms, whose controlling shareholder is the state, this relation is reversed. We attribute the reversed relationship to political interferences and further test this hypothesis by demonstrating that (...) regional economic development is negatively related to CSR for state-owned firms due to decreased political interference in more developed areas. This study is the first to directly examine the relationship between the dispersion of corporate ownership and CSR in emerging markets, and our results depict that it is important to consider ownership type in assessing CSR in emerging market where state ownership is still prevalent such as China. The results also reveal that firm size, profitability, employee power, leverage, and growth opportunity affect CSR in China. (shrink)

This perspectives article seeks to comment and reflect on my 1999 BAS article titled “Corporate Social Responsibility: Evolution of a Definitional Construct,” and subsequent writings addressing these same topics. First, perspectives on the 1950-1999 period are offered. Second, reflections on the 2000-2020 period are presented. Finally, thoughts about the future and the new normal for CSR are set forth. Hopefully, the observations presented will stimulate further thinking on this important concept. And, it will be interesting to all of us to (...) see where the dust settles when the pandemic ends and organizations have had a chance to re-imagine or reset their missions, goals, and processes with respect to CSR. (shrink)

In this article, we draw on established views of CSR dysfunctionalities to show how and why CSR is regularly observed to be both shaped by and supportive of capitalism. We proceed to show that these dysfunctionalities are maintained by both the pro- and anticapitalist approaches to CSR, both of which imply an ill-defined separation of the economy and society as well an overly strong problem or solution focus on political and economic issues. Finally, we present a post-capitalist approach to CSR (...) that overcomes (1) the ill-defined separation of the economy and society, (2) the capitalist bias towards economic rationalities, and (3) the overidentification of society with its political system; this approach thus helps to manage the abovementioned CSR dysfunctionalities. (shrink)

Governments are widely viewed by academics and practitioners as the key societal actors who are capable of compelling businesses to practice corporate social responsibility. Arguably, such government involvement could be seen as a technocratic device for encouraging ethical business behaviour. In this paper, we offer a more politicised interpretation of government engagement with CSR where “CSR” is not a desired form of business conduct but an element of discourse that governments can deploy in structuring their relationships with other social actors. (...) We build our argument through a historical analysis of government CSR discourse in the Russian Federation. Laclau and Mouffe's social theory of hegemony underpins our research. We find that “CSR” in the Russian government’s discourse served to legitimise its power over large businesses. Using this case, we contribute to wider academic debates by providing fresh empirical evidence that allows the development of critical evaluation tools in relation to governments’ engagement with “CSR”. We find that governments are capable of hijacking CSR for their own self-interested gain. We close the paper by reflecting on the merit of exploring the case of the Russian Federation. As a “non-core”, non-western exemplar, it provides a useful “mirror” with which to reflect on the more widely used test-bed of Western industrial democracies when scrutinising CSR. Based on our findings, we invite other scholars to adopt a more critical, politicised stance when researching the role of governments in relation to CSR in other parts of the world. (shrink)

As corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance, governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command-and-control policies to support it. As such, it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as New Governance policies, where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter-organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders. However, such (...) policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of CSR and its related issues, strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change. We explore New Governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context CSR and discuss the experiences with these methods in the European Union. (shrink)

The state is a key driver of corporate social responsibility across developed and developing countries. But the existing research provides comparatively little knowledge about: (1) how companies strategically manage the relationship with the state through corporate social responsibility (CSR); (2) how this strategy takes shape under the influence of political institutions. Understanding these questions captures a realistic picture of how a company applies CSR to interacting with the state, particularly in countries where the state relationship is critical to the business (...) operation. This article draws on political legitimacy as a useful concept to directly address both strategic and politically embedded natures of CSR. This work extends the currently under-specified political implication of the strategic view of CSR and provides fresh insights to the political legitimacy research by specifying a typology of CSR-based legitimacy strategies and its contextual variation. China and Russia are the focal settings. A qualitative analysis of business—state interaction cases is done using a database that contains the majority of CSR reports published in Chinese and Russian as the end of 2009. As a result, this paper identifies four qualitatively different types of CSR-based political legitimacy strategies and reveals how the adoption of these strategies differs across Chinese companies, Russian companies, and multinational corporations. (shrink)

The in-depth comparative analysis of political rhetoric in a Basque newspaper's editorials, published on 17/18 October 1997, and reporting similar events in Basque or Spanish, suggests that the use of these languages involved different constructions of the readership and strategies to express writer/reader communality. The Basque language editorial eventually conveyed an assertive we Basques, stressing the search of unity, differentiation and sovereignty. Conflict/differences between the Basques were omitted, backgrounded or ironised, while differences with the Spanish were foregrounded. The Spanish editorial (...) avoided using the rhetoric of we and blamed specific Basques for the repression of Basque secessionism. Subtle criticism against Euskadi Ta Askatasuna served to include it among the human victims. The implications of such fine-detailed differences are discussed as those linked to the struggle to strengthen a representative democracy patterned on Western models, which presuppose that since conflicting proposals can co-exist, the use of violence is unnecessary for the communities/political institutions’ implementation. (shrink)